While the post is a bit to technical for my tastes, the company is obviously taking this seriously and looking to not only explain exactly what happened, but better its communication with consumers when problems occur.

To keep it simple, Foursquare basically had an issue with storing check-ins to what they call shards, a technical term for a portion of a distributed database. One of the shards became overloaded. When Foursquare tried to add another to balance out the problem, the site crashed—for a long time. Looking back, the downtime appears to be the longest in the company’s history.

To better communicate, the company will launch a new status blog at status.foursquare.com as well as post hourly on the @4sqsupport Twitter account, retweeted by the main @foursquare Twitter account. A more informative “error” page will also be used from now on that will share status updates.